Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISONPower doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
RALPH ELLISON